Like others said, this makes no sense. First, it ignores women and other minorities who are currently beneficiaries of AA. Second, it ignores the fact that recent black immigrants face the same discrimination in the US as descendents of slaves. Finally, it is a solution in search of a problem. What possible good could come out of this proposal?
It wouldn’t be that hard. There are records for the generations born after slavery. Almost all of the first two generations were born somewhere in the South. That’s the test - black, and some ancestry in the former slave states between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I. That covers almost everyone.
People who weren’t covered, but wanted to be, could make their case individually.
This would be like making a tribal membership roll, something we already do for various Native Americans. It’s definitely do-doable. The question is, do we want to do it?
The two largest groups that benefit from AA are Hispanics and white women. Cutting them out of AA benefits will not be at all popular.
- But I’m guessing it is only a tiny percentage of the total*
Not really. When it comes to admission to elite institutions,upper class Africans, upper middle class West Indians, and the biracial children of white American, college educated mothers are the ones who benefit. People from regular working class black families are rare at Harvard and similar institutions. Plenty of Obama’s and Holder’s, but not too many Michelle’s. This disparity is increasing as Africa becomes wealthier has more access to American education, and as more wealthy black men marry white.
The proposal is absurd because it gives a person a benefit because of harm suffered by his remote ancestors. Maybe my many greats grandfather in 1778 was an indentured servant. I am not nor have ever been an indentured servant, so it does not affect me. If we were giving preference because the individual was enslaved, or grew up and saw family members enslaved then maybe we could talk.
I suppose the point of this distinction is to be able to claim that it isn’t race based, but the distinction is so paper thin as to be laughable. We might as well say that we are not restricting the vote to only white men, we are simply passing a law saying that in order to vote a person’s ancestors must have been eligible to vote in 1860.
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You’ve got some descendents of American slaves in this list. Eric Holder isn’t African. Neither are the biracial children of college-educated white folks, necessarily.
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Is the proposal going to prevent upper-class descendents of American slaves from benefiting from AA? Why should it do this, if this is supposed to be some kind of reparation for slavery?
I’ve often heard it argued that white women have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action policies but I don’t recall what arguments they used to back that conclusion up.
I don’t think that’s the point. It’s supposed to help alleviate racial disparities that exist today. AA is not reparations.
It’s true, the biracial children are probably also descendants of American slaves. They would still qualify for AA.
Holder’s family is from Barbados, though his mother was born here, to Barbadian immigrants. They’re also descendants of slaves, in Barbados, but they were “brown” middle class Barbadians as opposed to “black” working class Barbadians. Holder wouldn’t qualify under the new proposal. But then, he wouldn’t really need the help. He’d be doing well even he looked like Mitt Romney.
But an upper-class descendent of slaves can still be harmed by the inherited legacy of slavery.
I’m a middle class black person. If I can argue that I’d actually be wealthy if it hadn’t been for the enslavement of my ancestors, why shouldn’t I and my children be given favor? Helping all quartiles of the income distribution would alleviate racial disparities. Perhaps even better than helping only the bottom.
You can argue it but how can you prove it?
How can a poor descendant of slaves prove that their poverty is the result of slavery?
I missed the ‘if’ part this:
Sorry
This policy would be as unhelpful and unfair as other reparations plans. The best thing we can do with the horrible way blacks were treated in the U.S. is to put it behind us. I don’t say that cavalierly. I really think that if you could run multiple realities based on different way to move toward a society with the least amount of racial bias humanly possible (approaching zero, as eliminating it is probably unrealistic given our propensity for tribalism), that the plan that would work best would enforce discrimination laws and move on. Period.
Also, with this plan, how is it fair to the descendants of those who fought and lost people in the fight to eradicate slavery? How is it fair to immigrants how weren’t even here during slavery? Or who came here in the last decade or so? Including blacks who came here from Africa and Caribbean Island nations? And, with your plan, are you going to exclude the descendants of those blacks who profited from the slavery? Black traders and plantation owners?
This is what conservatives believed in 1880, 1920, 1950 and 1980, too, with the caveat that “discrimination laws” has to be interpreted kind of loosely. Was it always true, do you think, or about when did it become true and stop being a cavalier response to the issue?
To what extent is AA currently implemented?
What the fuck does AA have to do with slavery?
As others point out, the proposal is not only wrong-headed, but bizarrely so. And does OP propose that those with 3/8 slave ancestry be given 3/8 AA? Is his intended as a make-work program for genealogists? Does he know that present-day discrimination is based more on present-day skin color than genealogical details? Is OP intended as some reductio ad absurdem?
I think John Mace may have referred to the difficulty of documenting the association of an 1870 ex-slave family with some specific 1860 plantation owner. The 1860 slave schedules didn’t show slave names AFAIK.
Similarly, we’re almost all descended from Charlemagne, but how many can document their descent?
It’s a worthwhile proposal just for the fact that it would limit the scope of affirmative action. Limit it to Native Americans on the tribal rolls, and anti-bellum black Americans.
What’s ironic is that a large part of the opposition to AA stems from the perception that it benefits black Americans. If you could restrict AA to white women and Latinos, it would be a much more popular program.
Virtually every black American with ancestors in the South during the period between the Civil War and World War I is descended from slaves. Almost all black Americans have southern ancestry in this time period. It’s actually pretty simple.
African recent immigrants are substantially disproportionately represented in selective colleges.
*"While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them – perhaps as many as two-thirds – were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.
They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions."*
Lots of other data, which I encourage you to look up.
If you think of higher education as a stepping stone to upper echelon careers, I think you may get a better appreciation of where Rothstein’s suggestion fits in to the overall dilemma.